Page 45 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid (Hybrids of Yulaira #1)

“Elten?” Rentir echoed, disbelieving. “You cannot be serious.”

Haerune made a sound of agreement from where he stood near the window of the meeting room. It was an opulently appointed office of creams and whites, once reserved for the auretians to conduct their business. Now Thalen sat at the head of the ornately carved table in their place.

Rentir shifted in his own seat, wincing at the twinge of pain that raced up his back.

His right eye had swollen shut and his kidneys ached so bad he was sure he’d be pissing blood.

He would be in the medpod himself, but Yelir’s damage had been extensive enough that the device needed hours to knit him back together.

“It was Elten,” Thalen said, leaning back in his chair.

He was healed but still struggling with weariness.

“He was raving, fanatical. Said we had made a mistake in turning against the Aurillon, but they were willing to rectify it. They’d promised to take him to the homeland of his majority donor if he helped them. ”

“What would make him believe such a ridiculous thing?” Rentir muttered.

“He lost his brother during the revolt,” Haerune commented quietly. “A blood brother, as Ven is to you, Thalen. I fear he has not been in his right mind for some time.”

Thalen and his brother, seated directly to his right, shared a knowing look. Thalen sighed, scrubbing a hand over his jaw.

“Elten was a teserium processor, wasn’t he?” Ven asked. “Think I saw one who looked like him in the lower quarters, always tinkering on that experimental equipment they were hoping to replace us with.”

“Yes, that sounds right. I think Relden was his name. Highly intelligent, enough that he was granted a role in the development department alongside the auretian workers. A scientist at heart. Apparently, our progenitors were a shared fascination between them.” Haerune’s tendrils were moving restlessly at his back, making his curtain of sleek, dark hair ripple.

“A fantasy,” Thalen murmured. “One the Aurillon knew to dangle over him. They knew all along what was in that ship the humans arrived in, and knew just who to lure to their side. He took the bait. We had found a pod when he attacked me, but the female escaped. I crossed paths with her after, but…” He rubbed the back of his head, wincing at the memory.

“Sophia,” Rentir said. “She is resourceful.”

Thalen’s expression turned wistful. “She is that. And talkative. She could not stop apologizing when I awoke.” He shook his head. “There is more. In his ramblings…” Thalen chewed his lip for a moment, gaze flicking uncertainly toward Rentir.

“What is it?”

“He knew things,” he continued, glancing now at Haerune. “Strange and unthinkable things.”

Haerune turned away from the window, his focus singular on Thalen. “About the effects of the women,” he finished for him.

Thalen nodded grimly. “I do not know everything, but… I know now that it is no accident that there are no women on this planet. The auretians, they bond with their mates on a physiological level. It is intense, obsessive, and it changes them. Makes them stronger, faster, intractable.”

“We knew this,” Haerune interjected. “The physiological changes, I mean.”

“And the psychological changes?” Thalen asked quietly. “The dependency? The changes in character? It alters the mind. Divides loyalties. Separation causes withdrawal. Elten couldn’t stop ranting about how all things came at a cost. He wanted one of the women for himself. He wanted Sophia.”

Thalen’s eye twitched at that, the disturbance in his stoic facade so minute that Rentir wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it.

“He tried to convince me, at first, that I could join him, and we would find another woman for my own use. He said the bonding is not the same for everyone—that it might be instant or grow over time, but it would take if I wanted it, and I would become unstoppable. When I would not budge, he attacked.”

“That must be what the Aurillon fear,” Ven mused, steepling his fingers. “If Rentir is anything to go on, it wouldn’t bode well for them if we started bonding to the women. He’s defeated two of their soldiers now with a tenth of their advancements. Virtually with his bare hands.”

“What has it made me except desperate and unpredictable?” Rentir asked, his voice thick.

“What I did to Yelir… it was not of my conscious mind. I know I have done wrong, I know what the others think of me, that I am nothing but an Aurillon pet waiting for my masters to command me once more, but the things I did that day were borne of my own twisted rationale. This is different. It is pure instinct. I am an animal, now. I cannot be trusted.”

Haerune came around the table to rest his hand on Rentir’s shoulder. “You are not an animal,” he said, soft but firm. “You are going through a change we cannot fully understand—not without the data on the Gidalan. We will get it, and all will be well. I promise you this. Do not lose hope.”

Rentir set his hand over Haerune’s and closed his eyes, breathing deeply.

“Haerune is right,” Ven said, surprising them all.

He shifted in his seat as though discomfited by his own admission.

“You did not act when Yelir was berating you, nor when he put his hands on you. It was not until he mentioned Cordelia that you lost control. The two are surely connected. I will speak to him—and to the others. The topic should be off limits for the foreseeable future.”

Thalen nodded sagely. “Rentir is not the only one who is struggling with changes,” he said. Rentir assumed he meant Xeth, who seemed to be compelled only to torment his woman. “We will call for a moratorium, as Ven says.” Thalen sighed heavily, massaging a hand over his brow.

“What is it?” Rentir asked.

Thalen looked up at him from beneath his hand, his face etched with lines of worry and exhaustion. He seemed ten cycles older. “That is not the worst of it. Fendar has been reviewing the facility’s security since learning of Elten’s betrayal.”

Rentir sat forward, his good eye narrowing. “And?”

“Elten ripped all our communications to a disk before he betrayed us,” Thalen allowed a moment for that to sink in as a murmur of surprise rippled through the room.

“They have everything. All our correspondence since the rebellion. Our numbers. Our rations. How long we can last before we have to surface for resources.”

“Which is?”

“If we do nothing? Perhaps two more cycles, and then we will starve to death, fighting over the scraps of the vacpacs, for none of us has the slightest idea how to hunt for our own food, nor any crops to cultivate, even if we knew how. Our only hope of surviving long term is to open a channel of intergalactic trade, and we do not have a ship that could bear the jumps required, nor any heading to speak of.” Thalen sagged in his seat, closing his eyes in a brief reprieve.

Fear lanced through Rentir, and it was not for himself, nor even for the other hybrids.

Again and again, he had told Cordelia she and her crew were welcome to remain on Yulaira.

Had he been asking her to die a slow death all along?

Even if she hated him now, even if she would never utter his name nor do more than spit in his direction, he would not allow her to suffer. Not for a moment.

“Do the others know?” Haerune asked.

Thalen shifted in his seat. “They do not. None but Yelir and Ven. I do not want to cause panic.”

Ven rose to his feet and began pacing. “The other miners will spend their lives to spite the Aurillon rather than waste away slowly. They will blow this side of the planet to a crater.”

“It has not come to that,” Thalen said.

“Not yet,” Haerune muttered.

Now Rentir was on his feet, tail lashing. “Not ever!”

Ven’s scyra sharpened in warning, poised over his shoulder to strike.

Rentir tamped down on his anger, taking a deep, rattling breath. “Not with the women on this planet. Not ever.”

Thalen nodded his agreement, but his gaze was distant. “Sit down, Ven,” he said tiredly, grabbing his brother’s belt loop and yanking him back.

Ven relented, but his glare never left Rentir.

“So, either we starve to death, or we blow ourselves to pieces,” Haerune said bitterly. “Where does that leave us?”

Thalen’s mouth thinned. “We continue with our plan. The women will pilot us to the Gidalan, where we will liberate their sister, the younglings, and, fortune willing, the ship itself. They will have their own rations, enough to last decades if we are lucky.”

“Even if we take the ship, even if they never manage to get a call out, someone will come looking eventually,” Ven said ominously, his gaze gone distant.

“That freighter will be here sooner or later to pick up a shipment of teserium that was never processed. Maybe Fendar can block their long-range communications as he has the Gidalan’s, but without a doubt, the Aurillon will come looking for their fortune. ”

“One thing at a time,” Thalen said.

Rentir’s gaze drifted toward the window, toward the forest alight with the bioluminescent glow of night. “The Gidalan…” he mused. “She traveled here through deep space before setting up in Yulaira’s orbit. She could jump again, couldn’t she?”

Thalen contemplated it. “I suppose. You mean to attempt to establish trade once we take her?”

“Not in that nursery,” Ven said. “What meager defenses she had have been spent on trying to suppress us. Who knows what we could cross paths with out there? It would be a wasted effort, sending males out on such a venture just to be blown to dust for their payload on the way back.”

“That wasn’t what I had in mind,” Rentir said as his heart tightened.